Thursday, July 15, 2010

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s book of poems, Tulips, Water, Ash, was selected by Jean Valentine for the 2009 Morse Poetry Prize. Lisa’s poems have been awarded a Javits fellowship and a Phelan Award and have appeared in journals such as Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32 Poems, Third Coast, and Quarterly West and in the anthology Best New Poets. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son.

Participant in the semi-revolutionary turmoil of the 1960s, Martha Zweig worked for a decade in the garment industry at Concord Manufacturing in Morrisville, Vermont, including a term as shop chair for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and another ten years as an advocate for seniors in northern Vermont, where she has lived since 1974. Zweig received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1999, and her poems have been published in many of the nation’s leading literary and political journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Field, The Boston Review, The Progressive, The Kenyon Review, and Sojourner. Zweig’s previous books include Vinegar Bone and What Kind (Wesleyan, 1999 and 2003). Currently she volunteers for North Country Animal League and for Restorative Justice, a community organization promoting a post-police process based on the “truth and reconcilation” approach developed in South Africa.

Thursday, July 22@ 7:30 pm

Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacherby Monica NolanMonica Nolan will read from her new novel, Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher, # 2 in the Lesbian Career Girl Series. A steamy send-up of the illicit world of 1950s pulp fiction, Bobby Blanchard tells the sultry story of a former field hockey star, sidelined by injury. When Bobby takes a teaching job at Metamora, an elite girls boarding school, she enters a world of roiling passions, mystery and maybe even murder! Bring your questions and comments about lesbian pulp fiction for a lively post-reading conversation.

Friday, July 23@ 7:30 pm

a book party celebrating the long shelf life ofEverything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godardby Richard Brody

When they come out, books have parties. Over the first months of their release they'll get a few parties in a few different regions. After that, nothing.

What about those books still good past their appointed shelf life? Maybe they should get a party now and then, too.

But this is a CINEMA series. So we're showing films, and celebrating books related to the films, and bringing in the authors to talk about the books AND the films, years after that initial tiny birth-death cycle of publishing. And we'll be drinking wine.

July 23rd will by the first installment of this reading/screening party. We'll be showing A MARRIED WOMAN by Jean-Luc Godard, and celebrating the book EVERYTHING IS CINEMA by Richard Brody. Brody will be present to discuss the book, two years later, and talk about A MARRIED WOMAN, forty-six years later. And we'll sit outside and have some wine.

EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD (Metropolitan, 2008) Paying as much attention to Godard’s technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, New Yorker critic Richard Brody traces an arc from the director’s early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years.

A MARRIED WOMAN (1964, Godard) Macha Méril plays Charlotte — the title character. She’s married to aviator Pierre. She sleeps with thespian Robert (Bernard Noël). She talks “intelligence” with renowned critic-filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, and takes part in a fashion-shoot at a public pool. The “fragments” of the film’s subtitle are chapters, episodes, vignettes, tableaux; Une femme mariée is a pile of magazines made into a film, and a film turned into a magazine — the table of contents reading: Alfred Hitchcock. Jean Racine. La Peau douce. A Peruvian serum. Nuit et brouillard. The “Eloquence” bra. The quartets of Beethoven. Madame Céline. Fantômas. Robert Bresson. A Volkswagen making a right turn. — A film shot in 1964, and in black and white.

Upcoming events in this series will include Cineaste's Richard Porton (Film and the Anarchist imagination) with Vigo and Bruñuel, and Robert Gardner with Robert Gardner.